Monday, September 30, 2013

Clintons Muzzle their Followers to Re-Write the Record

Make
no mistake...the Clintons have been the victims of a great many smears over the
decades.Like no other politicians
(until Republicans began focussing on the President’s “foreignness”), Bill and
Hillary acted as a red flag to right-wing paranoia.Of course, some of the time the charges—delivered
by left and right—were true.Bill
Clinton did lie to the public about his affair.He was a serial triangulator, without any recognisable moral core.The Republicans’ Benghazi obsession might be
comical, but Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State does deserve close
scrutiny.

One
undeniable feature of the Clinton machine—and make no mistake, there seems to
be a community of staffers, donors, former and wannabe-future administration officials,
flunkeys, and hangers-on which is dedicated to advancing the Clintons’
ambitions—is its own paranoia.As
Hillary Clinton prepares for a 2016 presidential bid, the cogs in the machine
crank into action in an effort to protect the candidate from scrutiny, shut
down public inquiry, and control the narrative around Clinton’s presidential
ambitions.

Bill
Clinton said it best in a recent ABC interview: “You have to have a
strategy for presenting your true self to the voters, in an environment where
there are unprecedented opportunities for those who don’t want you to win to
paint a different picture of your true self”.Paranoid after her surprise loss to President Obama in the 2008
Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton is obsessed with controlling how she is
perceived by the public, and I suspect that the “true self” she might present
to prospective voters will include some important omissions.

I
doubt, for example, that Hillary Clinton will present herself as the dangerous
neoconservative who by supporting the disastrous, illegal, and immoral war of
aggression on Iraq, and egging the President to escalate the war in Afghanistan
and expand that war to Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula,
has not only contributing to the growth of a military-industrial complex,
exported U.S. terrorism, and presided over colonial-style wars, but has also
aided and abetted the unconscionable expansion of unchecked executive power.

I
doubt, in this economic climate, that Hillary Clinton will present herself as
the irresponsible neoliberal who by backing the banks and financial industry to
the hilt, failing to ask tough questions or see the dangers of deregulation,
helped to create the climate of irresponsibility and greed which plunged our
country into a recession and kept it there by handing golden parachutes to
financial criminals and layoff notices to struggling citizens.

I
doubt that Hillary Clinton will present herself as a self-interested
opportunist, a progressive of convenience rather than conviction, and a
stalwart defender of the status quo when, if she can manipulate the narrative,
she could instead present herself as the champion of the middle class and a
defender of U.S. interests abroad.

Hillary
Clinton and her team will have their work cut out for them if they decide that
distorting her record is critical to her electoral success.

But
they won a substantial and depressing victory when film director Charles
Ferguson decided not to pursue the documentary on Clinton he was making for CNN.Ferguson, who has an Oscar to his credit, is
best known for his documentary The Inside
Job (about the financial crisis), but he also made a film about the war
against Iraq (No End in Sight).I’ve seen him speak at UC Berkeley’s
International House (he’s an alum) on several occasions, and he’s no
radical.His film would have been
neither the hagiography Republicans feared (and which would undoubtedly have
been the price of Clinton’s cooperation) nor the hit-job Democrats worried
about.

However,
it might have asked some tough questions and taken a critical stance where
Clinton’s past and character warranted.This,
apparently, made the film unacceptable to Clinton and her entourage.The RNC, juvenile, idiotic, and
deaf-to-reality as ever, had threatened a CNN boycott, but it was the
non-cooperation of Democrats and the Clinton cabal which sunk the film in the
end.

Ferguson
outlined his rationale for abandoning the film in a Huffington
Post article.He recounts how the
powers that be in the Clinton’s cabal and in the Democratic Party stonewalled
his efforts to meet with sources.“When
I approached people for interviews, I discovered that nobody, and I mean
nobody, was interested in helping me make this film.Not Democrats, not Republicans—and certainly
nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons, or dreams of
a position in a Hillary Clinton administration.Not even journalists who wanted access, which can be easily taken away”.This behaviour is not just an affront to one
documentary-producer: it is indicative of how the Clintons view the public, the
democratic process, and journalism.The
key attributes of our democracy have become impediments to their ambition,
impediments that they are going to try to manage, sideline, and bypass by
relying on intimidation, party-discipline, and massive sums of money.

Ferguson’s
story of a conversation with Bill Clinton is particularly telling: “I asked him
about the financial crisis.He paused
and then became even more soulful, thoughtful, passionate, and articulate.And then he proceeded to tell me the most
amazing lies I’ve heard in quite a while”.For more on those lies, see the HuffPost article.Ferguson, who alludes to some of what he sees
as Hillary Clinton’s virtues, also outlined some of the topics he would have
investigated, topics which should undoubtedly be on the agenda of serious and
independent journalists in the coming years: the Clintons’ serial
triangulations and constant efforts to re-write their rather sorry records;
Hillary Clinton’s work on corporate boards (hardly the credentials of a
populist or progressive); the family foundation’s links to Saudi Arabia; the
well-oiled Clinton donor networks who are clearly not stepping up to back
Hillary’s presidential bid from the goodness of their hearts; etc.

But
he concluded that he “couldn’t make a film of which I would be proud...It’s a
victory for the Clintons, and for the money machines that both political parties
have now become.But I don’t think that
it’s a victory for the media or for the American people”.

But
for Warren or any other progressive candidate to have any prospect of breaking
through the wall that the Democrats’ political witch-doctors are building up
around Clinton’s record, or the adulation of the media, people will have to
step in to do the work that Ferguson thinks is impossible, and to circumvent
the hammerlock that money has on our politics by making it clear at the
grassroots that no kind of corporate-funded Astroturf organisation run out of
Clinton headquarters is going to be able to carry a neoconservative, neoliberal
opportunist like Hillary Clinton to the nomination without a strong backlash.

Here’s
to hoping that the Clinton Cabal will have weakened itself by showing its true
colours so arrogantly when it sunk the documentary that sought to perform a
public information service to the citizens who will be asked to vote based on
her sorry record.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.